Mark Byron

Rehab, Nothing Worse

I got some Googlage when I blogged on the no-reason-given departure of Jon and Sherry Rivers from national Christian radio network K-Love's morning drive show. We now know the reason; Jon was in rehab for prescription painkiller addiction.

The rumors of infidelity, or that K-LOVE had quickly let us go and other terrible things are simply not true. My Lovely Bride Sherry has been faithful to me and I to her. Lexi is fine and as happy as ever. And our K-LOVE family has stood by us, prayed for us and helped us continue on this journey of healing.

That should shoot down a lot of bad rumors.

Such problems can happen to the best of us, especially if we're trying to keep on a smiley face and say "Fine" when people ask "Howya doing?"

American Rouge

Here's a piece on actor-activist Kal Penn starting his new gig with the White House Office of Public Liaison; he's a savvy and smart Obama backer and will probabaly do well as a public servant. However, this closing line of the article gave me some pause-

When pressed about preparing for his first day on the job Monday morning, he said, "I brushed my teeth; I did floss, used mouthwash ... took the bus to work, same thing that everybody does."

Not quite, Kal. Personally, I tend to ignore my teeth in the morning and brush mosly at night ;-).

No, it's the taking-the-bus part that I take exception to. Like a lot of small-towners or suburbanites, I drive to work. I don't have the option of taking the bus to work for my night classes, since the bus lines servicing my part of Lexington close down before my classes end at 9:40.

I could take the bus in for my 8AM class if I wanted to take one bus up Tates Creek in SE Lexington to downtown, then take another out Broadway/Harrodsburg to the SW to get to the Sullivan campus. Of course, it would take me about an hour to do that bus routine as opposed to the 10-15 minute commute that a straight run along the New Circle Road beltway. It would also mean starting my commute about 6:30AM rather than 7:30, thus getting up at an oh-dark-30 hour after teaching the night before. No thanks.

Big cities are more condusive to mass transit, since parking is a major hassle in big cities. Also, if your job is in the city center, the hub-and-spoke nature of many transit systems that are geared around getting people in and out of downtown will work for you.

However, if you don't do business with the city center, a lot of transit systems are poorly designed to get you from 4-o'clock to 8-o'clock on the suburban dial. You can go into the center of the dial on the minute hand and back out on the hour hand, but you can move well along the perimiter of the dial unless outer loop routes cover the areas in question.

Modern liberalism doesn't like suburbs. It is too car-dependent, uses too much energy and gets people into a cocoon of domesticy that can get in the way of community. However, our non-elite culture isn't lived in subways and busses; it's lived in minivans and mall quadrants. Not everyone's life fits into the mass transit network;their work, churches, schools and shopping are often cumberson to do via mass transit and sometimes flat out impossible.

I'll plead guilty to a reductio ad absurdum here (and also using one the nastiest dictatorships of the 20th century; when you use the Nazis to label your foes, you're reaching) , but I'm reminded of the Khmer Rouge's empting out of the cities and making everyone peasent farmers; the fact that a lot of city folks had no agricultural background didn't matter, everyone was ordered out of the corrupting urban pool.

Liberal policy seems to envision folks settling along mass transit corridors and away from a suburban framework; suburbs are seen to usestoo much land, too much gas and sets up too individualistic a lifestyle that doesn't care for the community.

That's not going to work well in a lot of areas, for mass transit doesn't fit many cities and many lifestyles. You have to work near a mass transit line that hooks up with your home or else have a nasty-long commute and may have to pick your church, your shopping and your health professionals along that commuter line.

I don't think so, Tim. That's not as rash as the Khmer Rouge, but it would take a drastic change in American culture to get us to be mass-transit centric outside of high-density corridors like the Bos-Wash megaplex.

Higher American Decadence

One old bon mot that I've repeated for decades is "the height of American decadence is diet dog food"; not only are we fat, we wind up getting our pets fat too. Other pet-pampering products can wind up on that list, as entrepreneurs have discovered novel ways to pamper pooches and coddle cats.

However, I think I found the near zenith of luxury treatment; a "canine calling card" removal joint here in Lexington called What's the Scoop whose van I was stopped behind while commuting the other day? Their FAQ page steals most of the good one-liners from you, including "It's a CRAPPY job BUT someone has to do it" (caps in original) and "we're #1 in the #2 business". I have someone from my circle of friends in Midland who does dog walking for a living, but this is the first time I've seen this waste-removal service done.

Would you pay $10/week to have someone clear your yard of "steaming piles" (as we used to call bad essays in the fisking era)? Their van had a cute dog with a literal steaming pile (with the curly lines rising from the piles to indicate steam) of you-know-what behind him. That seems to be a bit of a decadent expenditure, but affordable enough where you'd at least think about taking them up on it.

Whoever owned the van had a servant's heart on multiple levels; the rear license-plate bracket had an evangelical message, something like "Heaven is free; Jesus paid for you." Washing feet and cleaning crap out of people's back yards isn't a bad matched set.

American free markets at work. Would a planned economy plan for such a service? Probably not.

Fallen Heros

A quick reminder; you only get called a hypocrite if you have standards you're trying to live up to. Folks who don't have standards don't get that rap; that's one reason why stories like Mark Sanford's resonate a but more.

When I heard the news yesterday about Sanford's clumsy affair, I was thinking that Sanford fans like John Claybourn would be somewhat crushed; Josh gives an even-handed look at his seemingly-crushed presidential hopes.

2012 is out of the question for Sanford, but something in the 2020s might still be in the cards if he gets back on the straight and narrow. He's only 49, and if he lets some time get between him and this incident, he might be viable on a national stage. Newt Gingrich gets mentioned as a viable candidate, and he notably having an an affair a decade ago with a staffer who would become wife #3 while still hitched to wife #2. Rudy had similar issues where he was an item with his current wife while still married to his previous wife and had a decent shot in 2008; he would have been a bigger factor in the 2008 primaries were he a bit more conservative on social issues.

However, the political calculus seems tacky while you have a guy who just screwed up big time and needs to mend a lot of fences, with God and his wife and sons first, then with the people of South Carolina. Jenny Sanford is leaving the door open "if he continues to work toward reconciliation with a true spirit of humility and repentance." For multiple reasons, pray that Mark Sanford get that spirit.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Spaghetti Monster

This is almost a Twitterish thought

(1) People are naturally guilty; we know we're sinners even if we don't have a concept of sin per se.
(2) People long for a way to get rid of that guilt.
(3) In the absence of God, they struggle to find a way to ditch that guilt, often feeling guilty of merely existing.

For instance, I recall surfing into a History Channel show Life After People, where they look at what would happen if humans were to suddenly disappear from the picture. We already see PETA take offense at Obama swatting a fly, might the next step be people opposing antibiotics on the grounds that the microbes have just as much right to exist as we do?

Speaking of which; I recall the the old Guinness record book had On the Antiquity of Microbes as the shortest poem-"Adam had 'em."

Mother Earth becomes a stand-in for Father God for many folks, where environmentalism takes the niche that religion use to; carbon offsets can even be viewed as a modern-day penance to Gaea.

We don't have to apologize to the universe for being; Jesus already took care of that at Golgotha.

Dogs versus Human

We're in mad-dogs-and-Englishmen weather in Lexington today, but it's my between-terms break and Eileen's between jobs, so we're at the library this Friday afternoon after a late lunch.

However, that's not the dogs in the title; it's the dogs Michael Vick and his Bad Newz posse killed off and got Vick two years at Club Fed. He's finishing up his time under house arrest and working a $10/hour construction job until he's freed up in late July. At that point, the NFL will have to figure out whether two years in prison and away from football is punishment enough or whether he will continue to be barred from the NFL.

The human in the title is the Mario Reyes, the Miami man that Cleveland wideout Donte Stallworth killed while driving home drunk from a party. Stallworth got merely a one-month jail term and a truckload of community service and a lifetime driving ban for his transgressions. That seems rather low, since the other sports-related killer DUI that comes to mind, that of Olympic diver Bruce Kimball, had Kimball getting a 17-year sentence (of which he served five) for the DUI-accident killing of two kids in 1988.

What's worse, killing a man by accident or killing dogs by design? Of course, you won't have PETH (People for the Ethical Treatment of Humans) protesting in front of the Dawgpound in Cleveland if Stallworth is back in uniform later this year or in 2010, but heaven help the team who has the grace and guts to give Michael Vick a job; PETA will be on them like white on rice. They're even ticked about President Obama swatting a fly during an interview. MADD might make a mild stink over Stallworth, but nowhere near the wrath that Vick's new team will get.

Both Vick and Stallworth are indefinitely suspended, but if Stallworth is back in uniform before Vick is, it shows where the league values human life versus canine life.

Note that I think both should be allowed back into the league if they've learned their lesson and are willing and able to be good citizens, but our justice system is a bit out of whack with this pair. There are plenty of other pairs you can use, like the casual drug user getting umpteen years while the rapist who gets a few months, but this is one that is front and center on the sports page.

End of the Line for the Wichita End-of-the-Lineman

Here is a sad story; George Tiller, a lighting rod for pro-lifer bile for his late-term-abortion clinic in Wichita, was assassinated this morning... in church- "Tiller was shot during morning services at Reformation Lutheran Church while his wife was in the choir, his attorney Dan Monnat said." Tiller was an usher there as well. That brings to mind fellow Wichitian Dennis Rader, who was president of his Lutheran church before being caught as the BTK Killer.

Unlike Rader, Tiller was working within the law; sometimes just barely, as "partial-birth" abortion laws started to bump into his practice. He had been shot before and seen his clinic bombed, as well as being the target of numerous peaceful anti-abortion protests.

Tiller is, as Ricky Ricardo would say, going to have some 'splainin' to do at the Pearly Gates. One can only hope that enough of the Gospel rubbed off on him despite his grisly and misguided occupation to get him a pass through.

Freddie's (Boss is) Dead

Here's a sobering story. Mortgage market-maker Freddie Mac's CFO, David Kellermann, apparently did himself in yesterday. Are you happy now, Senator Grassley?

To be fair to the senator, he was joking when he suggested that the AIG honchos commit hari kari, but a lot of people feel that way towards the financial big-shots. A lot of ill will is flowing towards folks who are often doing the best they can in a bad situation.

If you listen to talkers on both the right and left, there is little but bile pointed towards our financial system's leaders; it's not saying that the chattering classes caused Mr. Kellermann to commit suicide, but it surely didn't help. I know it wouldn't help my mood if I were getting ripped left and right in the media on a daily basis.

Now pundits will wonder if there is some massive problem that is about to hit the fan; what's just as likely is that he cracked under some exceedingly intense pressue.

Pray for his family, the Freddie Mac folks who will get extra scrutiny, and our financial system in general.

Not the Worst

One of the things that was running through my mind is the large number of the reality/contest shows that work on the format of getting rid of the least-popular or least-successful person each round, round by round, until the final two square off.

I think Survivor was the first of that modern breed, but almost all the multi-week contest shows work on that format, like American Idol and Dancing With the Stars, where one person gets visited by The Turk each week. Or, The Apprentice, where someone gets to hear The Donald say "You're fired" each week.

The Weakest Link does that in game-showdom, and it's a Food Network staple format, with competitions to get new hosts and a new Iron Chef running that ditch-the-weakest format. A new half-hour show Chopped gets four chefs presenting appetizers; the weakest app gets to go home, then the weakest of the three entrees gets the cleaver, and then the weakest of the two deserts gets their bags packed.

Do we blame Survivor for this? No, try Jack Welch; he makes Trump look like a softie.

Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers. He earned a reputation for brutal candor in his meetings with executives. He would push his managers to perform, but he would reward those in the top 20% with bonuses and stock options. He also expanded the broadness of the stock options program at GE from just top executives to nearly one third of all employees. Welch is also known for destroying the nine-layer management hierarchy and bringing a sense of informality to the company.

During the early 1980s he was dubbed "Neutron Jack" (in reference to the neutron bomb) for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact.

What the contest shows do is to adopt the first half of the platform, ditching the bottom-rung employee.

In corporate America, many managers have a good cadre that they don't want to break up; if everyone is doing their job well, a boss shouldn't have to select one to offer up as sacrifice to the pink-slip god. One friends of ours left a job as a manager when his workplace had him implement the fire-the-bottom strategy when he really didn't have a bottom to fire; he had a bunch of good workers, none of which deserved to be fired. However, if you're playing the game of Corporate Survivor, someone has to get voted off the island each year.

What we might be seeing in places that have this strategy is a bit of risk-avoidance, both on a personal and business level. If the goal is to not be the weakest link, one should avoid standing out and be part of the pack. If you can aim to be in the 50% percentile, you won't get fired.

Aiming high can also make you stand out, which might put you in line for Welchian bonuses, but might also put you in the unemployment line if your efforts are not appreciated by your boss or your co-workers. You might be hustling and doing a great job, but you might be earning the enmity of the semi-slacking middle who you make look bad; they might make your life miserable and make you negatively stand out.

I even see a bit of this in Christian circles, where we tend to focus on a bottom 10% of capital-s Sinners who do all those things that Paul rails against; the rest of us can get into some spiritual Welchism and see us well above that 10% that will get us voted off Heaven Island. We all have our low-grade vices that are often well hidden, but we can get a false sense of security if we feel better than the real reprobates. That was what Jesus ripped the Pharasees for, seeing themselves better than the spiritual riff-raff.

Jesus was more about reaching the lost sheep, the 1% that weren't with the program. We need to be working at bringing people onto the island (a.k.a. the Kingdom of God) rather than voting them off.

The Church and an Antinomian Culture

We're dealing with a post-Christian culture, especially in our academic quarters. One interesting scuffle that I've seen is to watch UK fight a more conservative Kentucky culture on things like same-sex partner benefits; college hiring at UK's level is a national market, and the national academic culture is one that is antinomian, wanting to give their peers the flexibility to pursue their personal lives in whatever way they choose rather than be forced to bow to traditional morality.

That seems to extend to our law school grads. Even in Iowa, we now have legal same-sex marriage thanks to their Supreme Court. You'd think that such middle-American folks would be not on that antinomian bandwagon, but seven of the nine were Democratic nominees (Iowa appoints judges, then they get retention elections); even so, the two Republican members voted for it as well.

Here are a number of thoughts on this front

(1) The world does go on, God's still on the throne, and the Gospel will still be preached. We are seeing a sociatal normalization of homosexuality, but that's only a symptom of a ignoring traditional teaching on sexual issues. The 40% out-of-wedlock birth rate should be of more concern than same-sex marriage; the latter directly affects a minority that have same-sex or bisexual leanings, while the latter is showing where a broad swath of couples are "getting the cart before the horse."

(2) The problem isn't as much with particular state Supreme Courts or state legislatures (Vermont became the first state to vote in same-sex marriage this week; the other three were court-imposed); the problem is with a culture that creates those judges and legislators. You need to change the culture before you change the government, for our officials will in general reflect public opinion.

(3) People can be faithful Christians and have blind spots on some issues. For instance, quite a few of us didn't say enough about torture in the last administration, forgetting that the Golden Rule applies to Islamic militants as well as our next-door neighbor.

Some folks in Christian circles want to cut our same-sex attracted brothers and sisters some slack. I find it easy to see them as brothers in Christ but also find it hard to justify acting upon those urges as godly activity.

It's often a moot point, since gay folks will be more likely to go to gay-friendly churches than the sexually old-school churches that I tend to go to. However, there is a place for understanding their dilemmas, where they give into urges that they find to avoid and either say that the Bible writers were wrong or that this is one sin that they can't fight.

Ray Boltz comes to mind; he's an otherwise godly guy who was miserable trying to be "straight." I've had enough battles with depression myself to be comfortable saying "well, be miserable, you'll have to tough it out."

How do we "hate the sin, love the sinner" without the sinner feeling rejected? We likely will have a few folks in our church who may be struggling with that and not feel like they have an outlet where they will be loved despite what their going through. Even a 2% rate leaves us with 4 folks in a church of 200 who may be struggling with those issues; I'd rather help them deal with them and keep them striving to draw close to God rather than see them turn their back on the church and go secular or go towards a more Diest view of God.

(4) There are also some folks who aren't dealing with that issue personally but want to cut people some theological slack on the issue- "a loving God couldn't let people have that strong of an urge and not give them an honorable outlet for it?" I'm not sure if I'll go there. I can see understanding people giving into such urges but I'm not ready to sign off on saying that acting on them is OK.

Quite a few of my blog friends are in this camp and I imagine that I'll get some feedback on this. You can be a good, saved Christian and be wrong on a theological issue; for instance, lots of godly folks in the South got sucked into a racist world view for a good hunk of the US' history and some haven't quite got it past them yet.

Another example is the materialism that can inflict the church; we have too many luxury cars in the church parking lot and not enough donations of time and treasure. People may be able to quote you all the right verses and themes that they learned from their 100-CD collection of CCM, but not thought about the $1500 that went into that collection and whether it could have been better spent on something else in God's kingdom.

Likewise, in my somewhat humble opinion, we have some people who have been sucked into our culture and its antinomian sexual paradigm and go along with accepting extramarital sex, including gay sex, as an acceptable part of modern culture. Or am I a bit too much of a legalist and need to let God's grace flow looser?

I'll argue the former, but I'm willing to be a bit generous if you think the latter.

No Guiding Light Right Behind Us?

I remember listening to an old Bob Newhart comedy album as a kid. His stock in trade on those stand-up routines was to take one half of a phone/walkie-talkie conversation; my favorite was No One Will Ever Play Baseball, where Abner Doubleday is pitching the game to Newhart as a game company manager looking for the next party game.

One of the skits was the Kruschchev Landing Rehearsal (the title alone dates the skit) where he was doing a TV director walking though the shots. Towards the end of the skit, he ask them to speed things up, "I've got Guiding Light right behind me." This interview had a Googlewhack on that phrase until now.

Growing up, an inside phrase in the Byron household to speed things up has been "I've got Guiding Light right behind me." The phrase could also be invoked to describe a tailgater in traffic.

The namesake soap opera has been on so long, it got started on radio.

Created by Irna Phillips, the show debuted on NBC radio on January 25, 1937 as the 15-minute radio serial "The Guiding Light." It made the switch to 15-minute episodes on CBS Television on June 30, 1952, although it continued to air concurrently on radio with the actors playing parts on both shows until 1956, when the radio show ended. In 1967, the series first started being broadcast in color, and a year later, the show expanded from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. In November 1977, the show expanded to a full hour.

Soap operas seem to have legs that prime-time shows don't have. Many of the shows my mom would have to drag herself away from in the late 60s to give me a ride back to school after lunch are still on. Even there, 72 years is staggering to be running on the same network.

The producers are looking for an alternative outlet. Syndication might be an option, or one of many cable networks might want to bring it on.

Carthago Delenda Est

Well, he didn't fully destroy Carthage, NC, but a gunman did a decent job of ruining its Sunday, killing seven patients and a nurse in a nursing home.

The slain patients ranged in age from 78 to 98, Moore County District Attorney Maureen Krueger said. The man accused of carrying out the attack, 45-year-old Robert Stewart, was in custody, and his condition was unknown Sunday night, McKenzie said.

Stewart was not an employee of the nursing home -- the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center -- and he did not appear to have been related to any of the patients, she said.

Sadly, there will be some that think that Stewart was doing everyone a favor; DirecTV only jokes about euthanizing America, but Stewart did just that in effect.

Let Your Mouse Fingers do the Walking

We had our local phone books delivered today, which is a waste of paper for my household. With broadband cable, we're far more likely to look something up on-line than thumb through a phone book. Google Maps will do a far better job than a phone book of listing available stores of a certain type and will include phone numbers along with locations.

It's interesting what the Web has done in many areas. Wikipedia and other web resources have made conventional encyclopedia obsolete, or at least not worth the hundreds of dollars to buy. The World Almanac used to be a yearly buy, but most of that information is a Google away these days and up to date at that.

What reference books has the Web banished from your bookshelf (or got them collecting dust) and what books still get used even with the Web?

Asian Occasions

Two Commerce nominees had to drop out, so the third one has to be a Locke. If Gary Locke's nomination is shot down in the Senate, it will be a Chinese take-out.

Locke had been on a number of VP lists in years past as a goo-gooey governor of Washington state and the first Chinese-American to be a state governor. We'll see if he has any skeletons in his closet, whether his taxes are paid up and whether his post-governor work has any funky conflicts.

________

Speaking of things Asian, we had Bollywood take over Hollywood for the evening, as Slumdog Millionaire won the best picture Oscar and seven other chrome-dome statues, including awards for its Indian composer and sound-mixing. Frank Capra goes to the Subcontinent, or at least the Rosie Perez Jeopardy subplot from White Men Can't Jump brought front-and-center.

On top of that, one of the sons of the Indian diaspora, Bobby Jindal, is going to be giving the Republican reply to Obama's speech tomorrow night. He's on the short list for the 2012 presidential nomination; we could do far, far worse.

What Can Browns Do for Us?

It's easy to demonize the other, especially if you don't know people in the other group. When left to our lesser natures, we will make fun of and belittle those others.

The current other of choice at present are Muslims. I'm working on focusing my thoughts on the subject after getting reacquainted with Kathy Shaidle's blog after having her drop off of my radar for a few years; Bene was venting at her "sewer of bigotry" last week.

Hyperbole? Your mileage may vary. If there is something in need of waste-treatment, it's excessive anger and aggression; she's not woofing when she calls her blog Five Feet of Fury.

When one of my two-year-old charges was troubled this morning, he started beating his tummy and toss-rolling miniature cars around the room at warp speed; when Kathy's troubled, she sets the aggression knob to 11 and lets 'er rip.

My enemies are belligerent Muslims -- from now on I'm calling them "brown supremicists" [sic] -- and the radical left. Both are unfortunately being enabled by our liberal elite Establishment.

It should go without saying, therefore, that I refuse to allow my enemies to control the way I speak.

Because if they control the way I speak, they will win. And I plan to win. Competitiveness and success being foreign concepts to many liberals, I don't expect them to comprehend that.

OK, she's got her game face on, but let's play smart and not just furious.

One of our enemies is belligerent Islam, a rather nasty meme that spreads well in folks that are frustrated with the world. It is the idea that is our foe; if we can wean people off of the idea, they're no longer our enemy.

A note, therefore, to my enemies:

You believe in the existence of a strange creature called "group rights." I do not accept the existence of said animal.

It follows that you also accept the notion of "group libel." Obviously, I reject that notion also.

I refuse to accept the faddish notion that only certain groups are allowed to use certain "offensive" words when describing themselves.

I refuse to adopt the fad of writing "not all Muslims" whenever I speak about Islam.

There are some offensive words that are best left retired. For instance, gays have often adopted "queer" as a badge of honor as self-applied, and blacks can use the n-word as a complement, as in "that's one bad n-----." However, the later word is so toxic, you can't even use it in print without getting in trouble; you can use the Lord's name in vain and f-bomb to your heart's content, but don't start a limerick that's first line ends in "Tigger."

I don't know too many anti-Muslim cuss words, nor do I use them. We just got done doing a section on stereotypes in my MGT 499 class; let me pull a except from it.

There are truckloads of bad stereotypes that don’t reflect well on groups. Please note that I’m not endorsing any of these.

Blacks are crime-prone and undereducated, Jews are all great businessmen, American Asians are all great at school and in science, Italian-Americans all are mobbed up, Arabs are all terrorists, Baptist-style fundamentalists are all dumb and undereducated, and folks from West Virginia are even dumber than that and always marry their cousin.

Such stereotypes keep us from dealing with people as individuals, assigning a stock character to a person based on their demographic group. For instance, African-Americans have frequently pulled over for “Driving While Black;” police officers can fall into stereotyping and get unduly suspicious about a black male driver.

Post 9/11, Arabs and folks of South Asian descent will be viewed as dangerous as well, even if they’re not Islamic, since you can’t see their theology at a distance in most cases. Airline security has seen a few “Flying While Muslim” cases in recent years.

How do we counter that? First, we can note that there’s really one race that matters, and that’s the human race.

Secondly, we can remember the “golden rule” of treating others like we want to be treated. Assuming the worst of others isn’t what we’d want done to us.

Thirdly, people aren’t bound by their ethnic group’s stereotype. A group may tend to have a characteristic, but that doesn’t mean that each and every person shares that trait.

While it's a bit PC to insist on saying "Not all Muslims are [fill in issue at hand]" not doing so both trots out stereotypes and can trot out what amounts to a group libel, charging the whole of a group with the excesses of a few.

I have to deal with Muslims on a daily basis. For instance, the undergraduate econ prof at Sullivan is an Indonesian Muslim; he was my fellow soft-drink-only drinking buddy back in 2007 when we had our faculty retreat at the Buffalo Trace Distillery. He's not packing any C-4 under his shirt, as my Iraqi-American MGT 499 student likes to joke about himself.

The reason he can joke about it is that I have treated him and the other Muslim students I have (two in that class and more than that in FIN 510) with respect. Not with deference or pulling punches (maybe once, where I had to refrain from making fun of a student named Yassir's name) but with respect. That respect will go a long way to keeping them from getting the jihadi bug.

One interesting thing to note is that there is quite a bit of common ground between Muslims and conservative Christians on social policy. Last week in MGT499, the subject tangented into dry counties in Kentucky; per Wikipedia-

Of the 120 counties in Kentucky, 53 are completely dry, 37 are considered partially dry or "moist", 29 are entirely wet, and one is classified as wet but is actually closer to "moist".

That's a novel concept to a Michigander, where the closest thing to dryness is not selling booze on Sunday mornings. My Iraqi-American student (born here but spent most of his childhood in Iraq) was agree with the dry laws, putting Muslims and Baptists in the same corner.

Last I checked, Muslims are people, too. If you treat them with respect, they're less likely to pick up the jihadi bug. Heck, they might even see Christ in you and come to see Jesus as something more than a prophet, but as God incarnate. You're not likely to do that stereotyping them as brown-supremacist terrorists. 

We might even get some allies in the culture war in the process.

The Green Faith

A couple of old-school Catholic practices was skipping meat on Friday and granting "indulgences", being able to buy your way out of sins; the latter got phased out by the Council of Trent in 1562 while the former was the rule until 1966. Even after the rule was officially phased out, my public junior-high cafeteria in the mid 70s would always have choices of fish or mac-and-cheese on Friday; for someone who liked neither, like me, Friday was brown-bag day.

We've already seen better-off environmentalists buying "Carbon offsets", financing projects that will either reduce the need to burn carbon-based fuels or sequester CO₂. Some folks have compared carbon offsets to indulgences, allowing folks to financially wipe out their sins against Mother Earth with carbon offsets.

We're now seeing a veggie Friday reemerging; one of Al Gore's buddies on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said that "People should have one meat-free day a week if they want to make a personal and effective sacrifice that would help tackle climate change[.]"

'In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity,' said Pachauri. 'Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there,' said the Indian economist, who is a vegetarian.

However, he also stressed other changes in lifestyle would help to combat climate change. 'That's what I want to emphasise: we really have to bring about reductions in every sector of the economy.'

And the folks on the environmental left say that this will be done without sacrifice? Not this guy, who wants the world to do penance for the bad karma of the past. At least he's honest.

Strong Words

This is out of ESPN, but I'm putting it in the "Culture" bucket because the underlying thought is more about cultural and political discourse than sports.

The backstory to this is that the LPGA woman's golf tour is phasing in a English-language proficiency requirement for players; the tour has picked up a large contingent of South Korea ladies as well as gals from around the world in recent years.

One of the tour's top players, Mexican-born Lorena Ochoa, was being interviewed on the issue.

She was asked at a charity event in her hometown of Guadalajara on Tuesday if she thought the new policy discriminated against international players.

"That is a a very strong word. I wouldn't want to use it," said Ochoa, who speaks English. "But I do think it is a little drastic."

I agree with Ochoa on multiple levels, but where she deserves praise is holding off on the heavy rhetorical artillery of "discriminated." So often, we're quick to bring out hyperbole and absolute language. It's not enough for something to be wrong, it has to totally wrong, the worst in record history.

If you want to bash the economy, it's not enough to declare the economy sluggish, it's required to call it the worst economy since Pliny the Elder. If a nominee is lame, you can't just call them lame, but the least qualified in recent memory. If there's a bit of corruption, it's the most corrupt administration in recent memory. Often, "recent memory" only goes back a few years, ignoring far worse episodes in the not-too-distant past, like the late 70s stagflation for the economy and Watergate for corruption.

People need to lay off the hyperbole and (as Ochoa called it) "very strong word[s]." We wind up crying wolf far too often, so that when the strong words are needed, they get lost by the times when the words weren't needed.

Evangelicals as an Ethnic Group

Here's an interesting piece from the Herald Leader's Rich Copley on the Rick Warren presidential forum last weekend. Copley is a pop culture writer for the paper, who's blog/column (some entries make dead tree, some don't) which includes a rather heavy dose of Christian music for a secular paper; he gets the Christian side of things by and large.

Anyways, here's his lede in the Warren piece.

I'm a little bit behind on my listening, so I'm going to pass on an album review this week. But there was a big event in Christian pop culture in the past few days worth mentioning.

Now, I don't call Saturday night's  Saddleback Church forum for presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain part of Christian pop culture to diminish it. At le blog, we give popular culture very serious consideration, and with the runaway success of The Purpose-Driven Life, Pastor Rick Warren is undeniably a major name in Christian popular culture. And it was undoubtedly that big name that persuaded McCain and Obama to make Warren's church their first venue for a joint appearance since becoming their parties' presumptive nominees for president.

My mind is wrapping around the phrase "Christian popular culture." It comes across as both accurate and awkward. Accurate in that there is an evangelical culture that works in parallel with broader secular culture; secular/general pop culture informs the Christian pop culture, but not much the other way around.

In an odd way, evangelicals are now an ethnic group. We talk about black culture and Latino culture, which have their own musical styles, radio stations, TV networks and stars. Copley indirectly points out that evangelicals have their own pop culture that is outside of the general pop culture.

We're starting to develop something of an ethnic group feel. It may not be as expansive as nation-based ethnicities, since there isn't a Christian food or attire (save the Holy Hardware t-shirts), but there is a separate Christian media universe that feeds into that parallel culture.

Some of it is solid, but others parts are creating a Christian-lite that plays into a suburban vibe; K-Love sponsoring cruises seems a bit too decedent for my spiritual antenna. The Todd Bentley show that just ended plays into that Christian-lite vibe, with Bentley playing the rock star and the prayer line taking the place of the mosh pit; worship as entertainment is the underlying theme.

Two things strike me. First, how do we make sure that we keep this "Christian pop culture" Christian rather than spiking the secular culture Koolaid with some Jesus juice? So much of what's going on seems rather lukewarm and un-challenging. Sometimes "positive and encouraging" is nice, but sometimes, you need to be challenged and rebuked if you're getting too suburbanized.

Secondly, how do we make the flow between Christian culture and secular culture two-way? The emergents try to adjust things to speak to modern culture, but often leave a big chunk of the Gospel behind. Easier said than done.

Lots to think about here, but no good solutions.

Talk Radio: Church of the Poisoned Minds?

I'm not quite sure where to go with this factoid, but quite a bit is being made of Knoxville church shooter Jim Adkisson's having books from a trio of combative conservative talkers, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and the very aptly named Michael Savage.

I don't spend much time listening to any of those three. I'm usually teaching when O'Reilly's show is on at 8PM and am more likely to watch Good Eats or Sportscenter during its 11PM rerun if I'm winding down from a night of teaching. I'm usually in my office when Hannity is on the radio, and I can live without his recitation of conservative talking points. I just miss the end of Hannity and Colmes by getting home about 10.

Savage raises my blood pressure more than any talker with the possible exception of Neal Boortz; his bile at anything that disagrees with him wears out its welcome in very short order. Liberalism is a Mental Disorder? I'm heading into pot-calling-the-kettle-black territory, but I'd venture that Savage would be more in need of therapy than Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi. I have people that are in my clan who like him, and that worries me.

Not everyone in the right-wing talk brigade is as caustic as Savage, but most will be quick to dismiss foes on the left as either corrupt, crazy or stupid. I wound up pulling the plug on Michael Reagan, usually one of the classier right-wing talkers, when he dissed one of the main lefties (either Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, if memory serves) as either "stupid" or "an idiot;" they may be misguided frequently, but they aren't dumb.

Such dismissal and dehumanizing of one's political foes makes the prospect of killing them less problematic. That doesn't mean all those folks are supporting such actions, but it makes it easier for troubled folks to go over the edge when you're demonizing and dehumanizing your foes.

Some of the talkers are church-goers (Hannity is a practicing Catholic; yes, he does need a lot of practice) and others like Savage and Boortz are essentially secular, but most come at things with an essentially godless take; it might be the nature of the talk-radio beast, but you hear very little love on talk radio and a lot of bile. Calmer, saner, and more caring talkers don't get the ratings.

There were angry conservative guys before talk radio came of age in the 90s. They just hear people echoing what's in their gut these days.

If doesn't seem that conservative Christian thought was driving Adkisson; Adkission had stated his hostility to Christianity to his neighbors. It was secular conservative thought that seemed to be a driving force. Some of that thought may have come from Irish Catholics like O'Reilly and Hannity, some from backslidden Protestants like Rush and others from Jews like Savage, but it was a largely secular hatred of the other that seemed to drive Adkisson.

He took out his frustration on a church that protected minorities, including gays.

Did those conservative talkers cause him to go over the edge? Probably not. We've had similar attacks prior to talk radio.

However, these guys don't help the cultural climate; angry folks might decide to take the concept of a "culture war" literally.

Unrighteous Indignation

The thought that is crossing my mind this afternoon on the Unitarian church shooting yesterday is that it isn't religious conservatives that are the big danger to a liberal social order, but secular ones. The sketchy portrait of the shooter was of someone who hated Christianity and hated liberal social policy. So, he took out his frustration on the most iconic of socially-liberal Christian groups.

Secular doesn't always mean liberal; many folks who don't go to church have old-school thoughts on mores. Those mores may be influenced by centuries of Christian thought, but culturally conservative thoughts on sexual issues are not uncommon in pagan non-Christian cultures. Such thoughts are all the more dangerous, since they frequently don't have the Golden Rule, love-thy-neighbor overlay of Christian thought to go with them.

Get a old-school pagan unchurched person angry, and you have a skinhead. We see a lot of that in Europe and we may have seen it yesterday in Knoxville.

[Update 7/29- Sorry, Yvonne. Loose choice of words. "Pagan" wasn't quite the word that I was shooting for, but it often gets used as a loose synonym for non-Christian. Sometimes the thesaurus doesn't get fully checked.]

Gentrification and Reverend Ginger

Here's an interesting WSJ piece on gentrification of some bigger cities, especially San Francisco and Washington; DC may actually become majority white if trends continue. This passage had me chuckling; a black Methodist church in DC is losing members as parishioners head to the suburbs.

While his church flounders, the predominantly white Capitol Hill United Methodist Church just down the street is flourishing. There the average attendance on Sundays has doubled to about 120 people the past five years. "Demographics are in our favor. We're attracting the folks that are moving in," says the Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, 38, who headed the church for five years before recently leaving for a position elsewhere.

It tends to be white, childless and more spiritually liberal folks that move into a big city; I don't think a lady Methodist pastor with a hyphenated last name is going to be a big Bible-thumper, while a black male pastor might be a bit more old-school.

Wait a minute... Rev-run Ginger?!? That's a straight line begging to be use, but it's the humor version of a Eephus pitch, so slow it's unhittable.

Whether it be the Lexus liberals heading out to the Red-tinged blue-collar country-side, like we saw with the Edwards' locking horns with a Rudy-loving old-school neighbor in exurban North Carolina, or yuppies tangling with traditional minorities at PTA meetings, we have an interesting culture clash. Seeing a more diverse big city is good in the long term, but it will make things more culturally liberal in the process.

It will be interesting what the Get Religion folks think about this piece

If I Had $10,000...

...I'd bail you out of jail.

The lead singer of the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies has been charged with drug possession in upstate New York.

Steven Page, along with two women, were arrested after police allegedly found cocaine and marijuana in a Fayetteville, N.Y., apartment, according to a Syracuse-area radio station's website, 9WSYR.com.

Page and one of the women were apparently arrested Friday at about 2 a.m. after police discovered a car with an open door in the driveway of a home. While they were investigating the vehicle, officers observed a man and a woman sitting at a kitchen table with a white capsule inside an apartment.

Police said the man and woman had a substance that tested positive for cocaine. Page, 38, was charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance in the fourth degree. He was reportedly arraigned in Manlius, N.Y., Town Court and released after posting $10,000 US bail.

...

Page's manager, Terry McBride, refused to comment on the case Tuesday while it is before the courts, but said he is confident Page will be cleared.

Until the case is settled, McBride said it will be business as usual for the Barenaked Ladies, who recently released a collection of original children's songs entitled Snacktime.

I guess the follow-up album will be Munchietime

The Wages of Sin

If you're Take-Two Interactive, Grand Theft Auto's maker, it's about $360 million. That's the estimated take of the fourth incarnation this week, looking at 6 million of advance orders at $60 a pop. That's more than all but the biggest movie blockbusters bring in and is on target to be the biggest selling video game to date.

Living out the life of a gangster in a video game, complete with sex and violence, doesn't appeal to me, but it seems to appeal to a large slice of the American populous, about 2% of which are willing to fork over a healthy chunk of change in order to enter antihero Nico's universe. When you add friends and family, that may be more like 10% who'll be introduced to the amoral mix.

That's rather bracing. I have five guys in my FIN 324 class that I just finished teaching; given that they're all in that 20-something gaming-friendly demographic, there's a decent chance that one of them was taking in the GTA4 universe.

How does that amorality affect one's world-view? It might not make people jaded, but it will encourage people who are to stay that way.

How many folks in your church are playing GTA4? More that we think, I would imagine.

Constistantly and Correctly.....

Fresh off the I Can Has Cheezburger site comes this nice counterpoint to this AP piece on teen STDs in the Herald Leader. The basic lead is that a quarter of all teenage girls have one, and the reporter trots out a lot of anti-abstinence-only doctors and officials.

However, I don't see anything in the basic news of the study in question to state that increased STD is caused by lack of "comprehensive" safe-sex-style sex ed. Our LOLcat friend here might agree.

The issue in the picture regards unwanted pregnancy rather than STDs, but a trashed Trojan could be a Trojan horse for either. The assumption in the comprehensive-sex-ed crowd in the article is that more teaching of safe sex means less unprotected sex.

The counter-argument for that is a judgment-free presentation of sex will lead to more sex; if the increase in sex is greater than the increase in use of effective "protection", then the comprehensive program will be short-sighted.

It doesn't take a feline Luddite to screw things up; many protection devices have a non-trivial failure rate, and any protection device has a very high failure rate if they're not used during the heat of the moment. Teens aren't known for their sophisticated level of judgment about their safety, especially when you the hormones are going full tilt.

On the other hand, if a abstinence-only program decreases the amount of sex, it may prove effective if it also decreases the amount of unprotected sex as well. Modern kids get most of the "protection" message through the culture and may learn more bad habits (or have them reinforced) than good ones from a comprehensive program.

I haven't seen the correlation between types of sex-ed and STDs as of yet, but the AP piece seems to take that as conventional wisdom.

Egalitarian America

If the polls are correct, the Democrats are on the verge of nominating a black presidential candidate... and if not, they're on the verge of nominating a woman presidential candidate. That's something that we've been aware of for months, but it's still bracing.

Even if I'm not thrilled at either of their platforms, it is refreshing that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have a shot at the White House, something that would have been impossible two generations ago and unlikely one generation ago.

Sexism and racism? As Pastor Steverson would of said, "we're past that." For the most part at least; we still have rednecks and misogynists, but they're a distinct minority.

There was an interesting Leonard Pitts column in the Herald Leader last Friday, where he's dealing with that other F-word, feminism.

Feminist, it seems, has ended up in the same syntactical purgatory as another once-useful, now-reviled term: liberal. Most people endorse what that word has historically stood for -- integration, child labor laws, product safety -- yet they treat the word itself like anthrax. Similarly, while it's hard to imagine any young woman really wants to return to the days of barefoot, pregnant and making meatloaf, many now disdain the banner under which their gender fought for freedom. They scorn feminism even as they feast at a table feminism prepared.

Says [Jessica] Valenti, "The word has been so effectively misused and so effectively mischaracterized by conservatives for so long that women are afraid to identify with it. They'll say everything under the sun that's feminist, but they won't identify with it because they've been taught feminists are anti-men, feminists are ugly."

At least that's what the academic breed of feminists get caricatured as. Most women don't want to fight the battle of the sexes and want to negotiate a peace treaty with the males of the planet. Not terms of surrender, but terms of interaction.

A lot of modern women are post-feminists, assuming the gains that were won in the 60s and 70s and moving forward. That's not to say that they want to go back to "barefoot and pregnant," but society's not forcing them to anymore and hasn't for quite a while. They're not looking at women as a separate identity group at odds with men.

Here's more from Pitts-

With apologies to Malcolm X, they've been had, they've been hoodwinked, they've been bamboozled. And it's sad. I've lost track of how many times, visiting high schools or teaching college classes, I have met bright girls juggling options and freedoms that would've been unthinkable a generation ago, smart young women preparing for lives and careers their foremothers could not have dreamt, yet if you use the "F" word, they recoil.

We have, I think, lost collective memory of how things were before the F-word. Of the casual beatings. Of casual rape. Of terms like "old maid" and "spinster." Of abortion by coat hanger. Of going to school to find a man. Of getting an allowance and needing a husband's permission. Of taking all your spirit, all your dreams, all your ambition, aspiration, creativity and pounding them down until they fit a space no larger than a casserole dish.

"I'm not a feminist, but ...?"

That's a fraud. It's intellectually dishonest. And it's a slap to the feminists who prepared the table at which today's young women sup.

Sorry, but it isn't quite a fraud or dishonest. Dictionary.com has two main definitions of feminism.

1. the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.
2. (sometimes initial capital letter) an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women.

Other than some very limited exceptions regarding combat and pastoral position in some churches, the entire American political spectrum signs off on #1. However, it's the attitude of those who are spokeswomen for #2 that give the breed a bad name in modern parlance; they're often unhappy, humorless and shrill, and modern women would not like to be associated with them.

While it isn't in too many people's working vocabulary, I'd like to posit the word egalitarian-"belief in the equality of all people." That defines what most people believe these days.

No one I know wants to go back to the way women were treated in the 50s, as Pitts lays out in that last except. Also, no one I know wants to go back to Jim Crow, for Pitts could have a good paragraph or two about the bad-old-days of segregation and institutionalized discrimination that we wouldn't want to go back to, either.

Believing in everyone's equality before God and the law is the norm these days. We don't always live up to it as well as we should and there are still your share of bigots, but they aren't the norm.

Last night had a controversy at the Rutgers-Tennessee women's basketball game courtesy of a conveniently-stalled clock in Knoxville; that brought to mind their championship game from last year and Don Imus' crass comments at the Rutgers ladies' expense the next day. Such crassness cost him his job in 2007, while a similar crack in 1957 wouldn't have had the weight of public opinion crash down on him.

The conservative stance these days is that people should be treated equally and not given any special treatment; the liberal stand these days is to give folks who would have been discriminated against in the past an edge to make up for those past slights. The conservative stance of today was the liberal one of the 50s and 60s.

The same can be said of women's rights; a conservative in 2008 would be a liberal in the 50s and 60s. Even the most conservative person in the race would be on the left side of the aisle by 1960s standards on woman's rights; Mike Huckabee's mutual servanthood of married couples still falls into type-one feminism.

We're not going back to barefoot-and-pregnant, nor are we going back to Jim Crow. We may scuffle over affirmative action and abortion, but the feminists have won the major battle to get equal treatment under the law. One evidence of that is how the Archbishop of Canterbury got into so much flak about saying accommodating things about sharia; it's substandard treatment of women make sharia a no-go zone for most modern Anglospherians.

To borrow from Tricky Dick, we're all egalitarians now. We're not all feminists or civil-rights activists, but we're egalitarians. That means we can accept what those groups fought for in the 60s without taking on their current stands that are tertiary to what they fought and won in my youth.

18-1

I don't think that it was the greatest Super Bowl game ever. There have been better games; the Tennessee-St Louis SB36 that had the Titans coming up just short on a last-minute drive, or San Francisco-Cincy SB23 when Joe Montana engineered a classic last-minute drive come quickly to my mind. The Giants-Bills SB25, where Buffalo's Scott Norwood just missed what would have been a game-winner, was another classic.

Even though it was a blowout, the Bears-Pats SB20 game was neat, crowning a great 18-1 Super Bowl Shuffle Bear team that included a lot a characters, including a Refrigerator Perry TD at short-yardage fullback. I recall the following year's Bud Bowl, where the bottle team brought out a quart-size short-yardage fullback, "the Appliance of Defiance, the... Freezer!"

As a game, this would filter down to about #5 in my mind. As a definitional game, it may be one of the most important; the Jet's win in SB3 was about the only one that was more iconic. It brought the 18-0 Patriots, on target to be the Best Team Ever^TM, down a notch; Belichick didn't win his fourth Super Bowl, denying both he and Tom Brady fully iconic status.

It's not that New England isn't a good team, but there merely a good team. They caught lighting in a bottle on offense, rolling the dice to bring in Randy Moss at fire-sale prices and found possession receiver Wes Welker cheap as well. Take those two away and New England is likely 13-3 and one of many possible AFC title contenders.

Last night, the Giant front four played like the terrorizing LT-led teams of the late 80s-early 90s (run by a young defensive coordinator named Bill Belichick), sacking Brady five times. Eli Manning played well enough to win, joining Phil Simms and Jeff Hostetler as underwealming Giant QBs to manage their way to a title.

The better team doesn't always win and the best players don't always carry the day. David Tyree came out of nowhere to catch a TD pass and grab a key jump ball reception on the final drive; he was their #4 WR at best, more of a special teams maniac than a receiver.

I'll get to the ads later.

Garcia, Rodriguez, Wilson and Martinez

That could well be an LA law firm. What is it? They're the most popular US surnames lists, spots 8 through 11.

You could easily be scorfing down some Cherry Garcia ice cream while reading about Pudge Rodriguez winning yet another Gold Glove while pontificating on Owen Wilson's emotional troubles and about Mel Martinez's leaving the RNC. Or, we could skip the wedding crasher and talk about Wilsonian foreign policy.

We may well see the day where historians will critique Rodriguezian foreign policy as an neo-neo-Wilsonian or neo-Bushian affair. Peru has a President Garcia, might the US have one in the 2040s?

Pearly Gate Pearls

Three obits from this week, other than D. James Kennedy that I blogged on earlier, caught my eye. One was of Lexington golfer Gay Brewer, the '67 Masters champ, who golfed well before his name would become a double entendre.

The big passing this week, other than Kennedy, was of opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti. Local columnist Rich Copley nails things here-

If you walked down most streets in America and asked folks at random to name an opera singer, most people would say Luciano Pavarotti.

Maybe you'd hear Maria Callas or Enrique Caruso from someone who knows a little history, and there might be the occasional opera aficionados with Placido Domingo, Renee Fleming or Denyce Graves on the tips of their tongues.

But most of the time, it would be Pavarotti, which tells us what opera has lost.

Domingo shows up on some folks' radar; I recall Sesame Street spoofed him with a Placido Flamingo character, but his biggest claim to fame for the American masses was being part of Pavarotti's Three Tenors crew.

Hearing his passing reminds me of a study buddy from Kent State, who had a love of opera; it's not often you'll see folks have an opera CD in the car (at least in the crowd I run with), but I can recall having Pavarotti going in his car as we tootled over to a Chinese place in Akron we'd hit on a study break during our Microeconomic Theory or Financial Theory Saturday review sessions.

Madeleine L’Engle was the other person passing on that is worth commenting on. I recall watching the TV adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time a few years back; L'Engle brought Christian sensibility to her writing, but often in a non-preachy, generic good-versus-evil way, not too unlike Tolkien's Lord of the Rings ethos. I think I read other stuff of hers, but it was back a few decades, too far back to dredge the memory banks.

A Wrinkle in Time had some New-Agey elements to it with supernatural good-witch-esque entities that aren't clearly divine on the side of good, but heroine Meg's efforts to take on the forces of evil to save her brother and everyone else hit the same chords as Luke Skywalker or Frodo did.

Passive Aggressive Riots

Barack Obama caused a calm ruckus when he declared earlier this week that a "quiet riot" was brewing in the black community 15 years after the Rodney King verdict riots. He might have used "Quiet Storm," but that was already taken for a slow-jam soul ballad format popular on urban radio stations, instead, we were treated to allusions to a libidinous rock band of the 80s.

Atlantic reporter Marc Arbinder provides a transcript of the Obama speech in question; here's an key excerpt.

Those "quiet riots" that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths. They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better. You tell yourself, my school will always be second rate. You tell yourself, there will never be a good job waiting for me to excel at. You tell yourself, I will never be able to afford a place that I can be proud of and call my home. That despair quietly simmers and makes it impossible to build strong communities and neighborhoods. And then one afternoon a jury says, "Not guilty" -- or a hurricane hits New Orleans -- and that despair is revealed for the world to see.

One of the things that dawned on me is that a lot of that despair that Obama catches manifests itself in passive-aggressive behavior. The Wikipedia for that describes it as

passive, sometimes obstructionist resistance to following authoritative instructions in interpersonal or occupational situations.

"No snitchin''", anyone? How about not doing your schoolwork for fear of "acting white?"

That seems to describe a lot of problematic behavior in youth, and not just black youth; you can find that attitude on many a teenager regardless of race. However, it's more pronounced in minority youth.

That attitude might help describe the decline of blacks in baseball; Gary Sheffield got attention for something other than his hot home-run bat earlier this week when he declared that there are more Hispanics than blacks in the majors because blacks are harder to control.

Where I'm from, you can't control us. You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is.

Many of the skills in baseball need to be taught rather than just picked up. That requires time, patience and listening to teachers and coaches. Such discipline runs counter to that passive-aggressive mindset. It's a lot easier and a lot less authoritarian to be able to hit a jumper in traffic.

There isn't a good way to get past that. Expressing your frustrations and bringing them to the surface rather than letting them fester is the standard proscription for dealing with that; a lot of the angry rap and hip-hop music may well be one method of doing that for a good chunk of the population.

There isn't a good short-term solution to that attitude problem. More law enforcement won't help much, and government jobs and education programs won't help unless attitudes change and folks are ready to take advantage of their opportunities.

The best we can do as Christians is to try and lift up the spirits of folks who are POed at life. The best we can do as citizens is to try and encourage a positive attitude about life and the future, something many politicians fail to do, since it's easier to dwell on problems and threats than to try to solve them.

Interpretations

Two seemingly unrelated items got me thinking this week; the conclusion of this year's American Idol, and the visit to Midland of the Christian vocal group Glad.

I'm not an AI watcher, but it's hard not to inadvertently follow along by the news coverage and blogage about the show; young Jordin Sparks won the sixth season's title Wednesday.

So far, the champions have had a mixed level of success. First-year champ Kelly Clarkson has had a solid pop career and year 4 champ Carrie Underwood is carving out a solid niche as a country star, but Rubin and Fantasia haven't lived up to specs as of yet (at least from my cursory knowledge of the modern music scene); it's too early to write them off or last year's surprise winner Taylor Hicks, but we're looking at 2-for-5 as a hit-producer at this point.

What AI has done is helped bring back the art of song-interpretation. Pre-rock, there was a musical school, especially in vocal jazz, of interpreting classic songs from the "songbook." Singers were judged by how they sung the song, not on whether they could come up with new material.

However, since the 60s, the singer-songwriter has been the primary paradigm for pop success. Some folks can make a career out of singing other people's songs, especially if they're new material, but few if any people can get a career started singing classics. An existing star can do a standards album, but only after they've made it big singing new material.

Such albums seem to be more common today than in the past. I wonder if AI has had a hand in that. Or are we at a point where we have roughly a half-century with of rock-style music and the old time music is better than what modern songwriters are managing to come up with?

On to the Glad angle....

Glad was in Midland to do a free concert. My parent's Methodist church is in charge of a trust fund to finance a free concert each May; Point of Grace was the guest last year and operatic tenor Ronan Tynan was the 2005 guest. I only got to see the first half before excusing myself at intermission to get back for tutoring.

However, I got to hear the stellar harmonies that was a regular on our local Family Life Radio station in the late 80s. FLR has always been about 10 years behind the curve, so they weren't quite on the CCM bandwagon when I came to the Lord in 1985. The "pure and spotless Sandy Patti" (as David Wayne sarcastically described her recently) was about as cutting edge as they were willing to go at that point, and Glad fit into their paradigm of contemporary-flavored traditional Gospel, bringing some jazz harmonies to hymns or Christian standards, especially when their A Cappella Project album came around in 1988.

Tuesday's concert saw those harmonies still going strong, despite the band members being AARP-eligible after being at it for three decades; they did everything from modern praise to hymns to some CCM classics like Awesome God, all with reverence, impeccable harmony and deadpan humor, like mentioning the sign-language interpreter at a  past concert on their 80-some-fold version of the Presbyterian five-fold-amen.

We're also seeing a discovery of interpretation in CCM these days, as many artists will do praise music or hymn albums where they will do their take on modern classics or centuries-golden-oldies. However, like on the pop side, it's rare for Christian artists to make a career out of coving other folks' songs; Glad is the exception to that rule.